


The Way Home

by starryreys



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s02e08 The Rescue, Fix-It, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, in which din and grogu are safe and together after the finale and nobody gets separated!!, writing soft father & son content is self care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:07:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28643433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starryreys/pseuds/starryreys
Summary: “Hey,” Cara’s voice from behind him suddenly startles him out of his thoughts. He turns around to look at her where she’s still standing in the doorway. “Are you alright?” she asks.He looks down to the kid in his arms, tired and hurt, but safe and here. “Yeah,” he says, “I am.(Din and Grogu make it off Gideon's light cruiser together, and Din removes his helmet for an entirely different reason.)
Relationships: Din Djarin & Cara Dune, Din Djarin & Grogu | Baby Yoda
Comments: 30
Kudos: 273





	The Way Home

Cara’s home is a small dwelling just outside Nevarro City. Din eyes the arched doorway, the patch of greenery in the front. It looks nice, comfortable. Probably more comfortable than she’s used to, Din thinks, as they both pause at the entrance. 

She seems to read his body language. “It’s a bit much,” she says with a grimace. “I told the New Republic I was fine sleeping on my ship, but they insisted. Something about setting a good example as a Marshal.”

“It’s nice,” he replies, stifling a laugh. “Going straight has its advantages.”

She shakes her head at him. “Come on,” she says, pushing the door open. “I’m heading back into the city, so you and the kid can take my bunk. I’m going to be up all night filling out reports on Gideon’s Darktroopers for the New Republic anyway. We’ll find you a good ship in the morning.” She removes her blasters from her waist belt as they step inside, laying them carefully on a ledge next to the door, before reaching for a datapad stamped with the New Republic insignia. “Going straight has its downsides too,” she adds wryly, slipping the datapad under her arm.

“I could help you,” Din offers. The thought of filling out paperwork for the Republic is admittedly, much less appealing to him than fighting a krayt dragon, but he owes Cara more than she knows.

She laughs. “No offense, but you look wrecked-and I can’t even see your face.” She looks down at the kid still in his arms. He refused to let go of Din since he picked him up on Gideon’s cruiser, making loud noises of protest everytime Din tried to set him down. He sat in his lap the entire ride to Nevarro. “Bed’s right over there,” she says tilting her head towards the small bunk in the corner of the room. “Get some sleep, you both need it.” She frowns as she reaches a hand out to stroke Grogu’s ear. He seems to soften under her touch, the tension easing a bit from where he’s clinging onto Din’s arm. “Take care of him,” she says quietly, before turning to go. 

“Thank you,” he calls after her, “for everything, Cara.” 

“You know me,” she says with a half smile as she pushes the door open, “I always love a good excuse to hunt down Imperials.” 

He turns back around as she leaves, taking a small inhale. He feels like he can finally breathe for the first time in days. He looks down to Grogu still clinging to his arm and wonders what’s going on inside the kid’s head behind those wide eyes. 

“Hey,” Cara’s voice from behind him suddenly startles him out of his thoughts. He turns around to look at her where she’s still standing in the doorway. “Are you alright?” she asks. 

He looks down to the kid in his arms, tired and hurt, but safe and here. “Yeah,” he says, “I am.”

She gives him a nod before turning to go again. Din looks over to Cara’s small kitchen on the other side of the room and then back down to Grogu, who makes a small noise in response to his questioning gaze. He wonders when the last time the kid ate was, he thinks maybe he should feed him something before putting him to bed. “You hungry, pal?” he asks, raising his free hand up to stroke Grogu’s ear, who reaches up as he does, wrapping his tiny hand around one of his fingers. He keeps his hand there, letting Grogu cling to it, when he realizes he never heard the door behind him close. 

He turns around to look at Cara, who’s still standing there just staring at them. There’s something strange in her expression.

“What is it?” he asks. 

She just shakes her head slowly at them, her mouth twisting into something that’s both wistful and hopeful at the same time. “I couldn’t save my world from the Empire,” she says in a quiet voice, “I’m glad I was able to help you save yours.”

She steps out and softly closes the door behind her. 

Din sets Grogu down on Cara’s bunk, picking up the single grey blanket that lays on top of it and wrapping it snugly around the kid, before stepping back to take a look at him. Grogu settles into the blanket, his ears flattening in contentment. He looks up at Din and his eyes are wide and expectant. 

Din sighs and begins to ease the jetpack off his back, setting it down next to the beskar staff. He pushes the kid gently to the other side of the bed and climbs in next to him, his joints moving stiffly and painfully. He can feel the ache now that the weight of the jetpack is off him-now that the weight of a lot of things are off him. There’s a dull throb in his forearms and shoulders from every blow that he shielded against the Darksaber. The beskar protected him from the heat and cut of the blade, but every hit still fell down upon him like a heavy sword. There’s a lacerating pain that runs up his back with every small movement from where the Darktrooper threw him against the wall. He groans as he lies down.

Grogu looks at him in alarm and makes a small noise of distress, withdrawing a hand from the blanket to reach for Din. Din takes his hand and pushes it back under the blanket. “I’m okay, buddy,” he says quickly, settling back down onto Cara’s pillow, this time refraining from showing any indications of pain. Grogu inches over and curls up against his side. Din crosses his arms against his chest and closes his eyes. 

After a minute, he feels movement at his side. He opens his eyes and tilts his head down to his left to where the kid is struggling out of the blanket and reaching a hand for him again. 

“Hey, no, no,” he says firmly, pushing Grogu’s hand back down again. “We’ve talked about this, no using your magic healing powers on me.”

Grogu’s ears and face both sink in disappointment, his mouth turning down into a small frown and Din sighs again. If he wasn’t worried about what Gideon did to the kid, he thinks maybe he should just let him use his powers, at least it would knock him out enough to sleep. He knows the kid must be exhausted, but Grogu looks up at Din, his eyes alert and awake. He’s not going to let him do that though, he doesn’t understand the power enough to risk it. He only knows the kid drops like a rock when he uses it and that can’t be good for him, can it?

Grogu blinks up at him and stretches his hand out a third time and for some reason Din knows it’s not just his usual stubbornness. There’s something wrong, he can feel it. He props himself up on his elbows and looks at Grogu as he reaches for him.

It takes him a second to realize the kid is shaking.

Something strange runs through his chest at the sight. Something that’s more keenly painful than any of the injuries on his body. 

“Hey,” Din whispers, reaching out and wrapping his fingers as gently as he can around the kid’s hand. “It’s okay. Nothing’s going to happen to me, and I’m not going to let anything happen to you again, okay?” 

It’s not a promise he can make, but it’s one he’ll die trying to keep. Grogu makes a small noise at him that sounds like a question and he plucks him out of the blanket, pulling him up against his chest so his head lies over Din’s heart. He picks up the blanket and drapes it over both of them. Grogu quiets and after a few minutes, his eyelids slowly droop, his breathing evening out into slow deep sounds. 

For a few minutes, Din just lies there quietly in the dark. The kid is solid and warm on his chest, and Din takes a second to breathe himself. He hadn’t realized how much he’d come to depend on the little things, like the peaceful sounds of his sleeping kid next to him, until he thought it might all be ripped away. 

There’s guilt creeping up in his chest too. The kind of guilt that’s going to bite and claw at him until he’s crippled by it. He let Grogu get taken, he let Grogu get hurt. And now the kid is more scared than Din’s ever seen him.

It’s hard not to think about killing Gideon, to think that he shouldn’t have spared his life in the end. But he knows that would have been self indulgent, that handing him over to the New Republic does more good. Still, there’s a kind of rage that burns inside when he thinks about Gideon standing over his kid with the Darksaber. 

And then of course, there’s the Darksaber. He reaches down, trying not to jostle the kid too much, and unclips the saber from his waist belt. He looks at the hilt, turning it over slowly in his hand. He’d never really thought much of Mandalore until now. It was a wasteland, the Armorer had told him, a ghost planet. He didn’t have the connection to it that a Mandalorian like Bo-Katan did. Bo-Katan whose eyes had lingered on him from the moment he appeared with the Darksaber in his hand to the moment he boarded Cara’s New Republic ship. He knows it’s only a matter of time before she comes for it-and he hopes she does. He can’t wait to be rid of the thing. He had tried again to give it to her before he left with Cara.

_“Look,” he said, just wanting to get the kid out of there, “I’ll tell everyone you overpowered me and took it, okay?”_

_“But_ he _won’t,” Bo-Katan said, jerking her head towards Gideon, her eyes dangerous and her hands twitching towards Gideon in a way that made Din uneasy._

_“You can’t kill him,” Cara said, stepping between them. “The New Republic is coming to take him away for questioning.”_

_Bo-Katan turned back towards Din silently, just waiting, just watching._

_“If you don’t take it,” he continued, gritting his teeth, forcing down the exhaustion and exasperation in his throat, “I’ll just leave it here.”_

_”No you won’t.” It was both a threat and a judgement. “The Darksaber is an ancient Mandalorian weapon. And you won’t even remove your helmet.”_

He slowly ignites the Darksaber, watching its glow faintly light up the room, as he thinks about Bo-Katan’s biting assessment of him. Mostly about how she was right. He wasn’t just going to leave a Mandalorian weapon lying around. By creed, he’s required to protect it as he would the beskar. 

He moves the saber through the air, listening to it’s hum, to the energy crackling around the edges. Maybe he’ll track down Ahsoka Tano and hand it over to her. He’s not sure what she would do with a third laser sword but the look on Bo-Katan’s face when she hears the Darksaber is in the hands of a Jedi would be well worth it.

But he won’t do that either. A Mandalorian weapon with this much history and weight should be in the hands of a Mandalorian. But the idea is tempting. The thing is clearly more trouble than it’s worth. Still, he can’t fault Bo-Katan for refusing to let him hand it to her. Everyone has their creed. 

He suddenly feels a hand pawing at his arm and looks down. He thought the kid had gone to sleep but he sees Grogu’s eyes fixated on the weapon in his hand. He deignites it and drops it instinctively. It hits the floor with a soft thud. “Sorry buddy,” he murmurs, curling up on his side so Grogu is in a more comfortable position next to him, “I know you don’t want to see that.”

Grogu settles back down against him. Din bends his head over slightly to see if he’s gone back to sleep, but his eyes are as wide and awake as they were before. 

Ahsoka had said the Grogu had hidden his powers over the years to survive. She said it seemed like he’d been lost, that she sensed fear in him. Din can’t imagine the fear the kid must have felt, imprisoned on the light cruiser, used as an experiment for whatever dark forces Gideon was trying to create. He swallows back the rising anger in his chest again, it’s not going to help the kid now. But thirty years of Grogu concealing his powers to protect himself from exactly what had come to pass-Din can’t bear to think about it. 

He reaches over and lights a lamp that Cara has on the small table next to the bunk. It sends a soft warm glow through the room that reflects off Grogu’s wide eyes. The kid makes a small, placated noise, but as Din looks at him, at the barely there tremble that still runs through Grogu’s body, he knows no night lamp will be enough to quell a fear thirty years in the making. There’s a soft pang in his chest as he wishes for the Razor Crest. If he still had the hammock he could rock the kid to sleep.

There’s a kind of helplessness starting to rise inside him. How is he ever going to help the kid heal from something like this? 

As he asks himself the question, the answer comes. Because suddenly when he looks down at Grogu, for a second, he’s looking into a mirror. One that shows a small, terrified boy who had just lost his parents and everything he had known and loved. 

A Mandalorian had put his hands on his shoulders that night, had pulled him into a hug. Then he’d knelt down and held out a beskar helmet in his hands. And as Din put the helmet on, it had given him a shelter. Not just a physical one, but the shelter of a new home, a new family. It was what he had needed.

He knows what Grogu needs now. 

_By creed you are as it’s father. This is the way,_

“This is the way,” he murmurs to himself. 

His hands had shaken when he’d pulled off the Imperial helmet in the Morak refinery.

They’re steady now. 

He lifts the helmet off his head, his fingers moving slowly, deliberately, and sets it down on the bed with great care. 

Grogu looks at the helmet with wide eyes, and then up to Din’s face. He pushes himself up against Din until he’s close enough to his face to touch. He reaches his tiny hand out and presses it against Din’s cheek. 

And for the first time that night, Grogu’s hand is steady.

And Din knows he’s not breaking his creed. He’s fulfilling it.

And as his kid looks him in the eye, he can see the love in his own eyes reflected back at him. Grogu coos softly and settles back down against his chest. His expression peaceful, his eyes finally closing as he falls into a gentle sleep. 

They’ve both found their way home.

**Author's Note:**

> me: the ending of the mandalorian season two was perfect storytelling, and I know there's no other way it could have ended besides demonstrating that Din and Grogu's love was strong enough that they did the right thing and let each other go
> 
> also me: throw good storytelling Into the garbage chUTE FLYBOY!!! I don’t care if the baby turns into a sith lord because he doesn’t get the training he needs, let them be happy and together!!!
> 
> (Thanks so much for reading! My life has been taken over by one tired space dad and his small green son, and I really needed a self-indulgent happy ending to that finale, so I hope you enjoyed this too!)


End file.
